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Will it Sell?

Many of us develop things for one of two purposes: to hack something cool, or to sell something cool. When hacking something cool, your target market is yourself, and you already know you’ve made the sale. If your goal is to sell the thing you are making, then a lot more thought and effort is required. You could develop the coolest product in the world, but if your target market is too small, your price is too high, your lead time is too long, or any of a dozen other factors is not quite right, you’ll be spending a lot …read more

Mechanical Image Acquisition With A Nipkow Disc

If you mis-spent your teenage years fishing broken televisions from dumpsters and either robbing them for parts or fixing them for the ability to watch The A Team upstairs rather than in the living room as I did, then it’s possible that you too will have developed a keen interest in analogue television technology. You’ll know your front porch from your blanking interval and your colour burst, you might say.

There was one piece of television technology that evaded a 1980s dumpster-diver, no 625-line PAL set from the 1970s was ever going to come close to the fascination of the …read more

The PDP-1: The Machine that Started Hacker Culture

One of my bucket list destinations is the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — I know, I aim high. I’d be chagrined to realize that my life has spanned a fair fraction of the Information Age, but I think I’d get a kick out of seeing the old machines, some of which I’ve actually laid hands on. But the machines I’d most like to see are the ones that predate me, and the ones that contributed to the birth of the hacker culture in which I and a lot of Hackaday regulars came of age.

If you were …read more

CastAR Shuts Doors

Polygon reports CastAR is no more.

CastAR is the brainchild of renaissance woman [Jeri Ellsworth], who was hired by Valve to work on what would eventually become SteamVR. Valve let [Jeri] go, but allowed her to take her invention with her. [Jeri] founded a new company, Technical Illusions, with [Rick Johnson] and over the past few years the CastAR has appeared everywhere from Maker Faires to venues better focused towards innovative technologies.

In 2013, Technical Illusions got its start with a hugely successful Kickstarter, netting just north of one million dollars. This success drew the attention of investors and eventually …read more

Hacking an Inspection Microscope

Sometimes I need to be able to take photographs of very small things, and the so-called macro mode on my point-and-shoot camera just won’t cut it. And it never hurts to have an inspection scope on hand for tiny soldering jobs, either, though I prefer a simple jeweler’s loupe in one eye for most tasks. So I sent just over $40 off to my close friend Alibaba, and a few weeks later was the proud owner of a halfway usable inspection scope that records stills or video to an SD card.

Unfortunately, it’s only halfway useable because of chintzy interface …read more

From The Blog

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  • This Way to the Ingress: Keeping Stuff Dry and Clean with IP and NEMA

    1 Comment

    By Dan Maloney | June 30, 2017

    When designing a piece of hardware that has even the faintest chance of being exposed to the elements, it’s best to repeat this mantra: water finds a way. No matter how much you try to shield a project from rain, splashing, or even just humid air, if you haven’t taken precautions to seal your enclosure, I’ll bet you find evidence of water when you open it up. Water always wins, and while that might not be a death knell for your project, it’s probably not going to help. And water isn’t the only problem that outdoor or rough-service installations face. …read more

  • Printrbot Teases Infinite Build Volume Printer

    8 Comments

    By Brian Benchoff | June 30, 2017

    [Brook Drumm] of Printrbot is teasing a new 3D printer. This is no ordinary 3D printer; this is an infinite build volume 3D printer, the Next Big Thing™ in desktop fabrication.

    The world was introduced to the infinite build volume 3D printer last March at the Midwest RepRap Festival with a built by [Bill Steele] from Polar 3D. The design of [Bill]’s printer began as simply a middle finger to MakerBot’s Automated Build Platform patent. This was patent engineering — [Bill] noticed the MakerBot patent didn’t cover build plates that weren’t offset to the plane of the print head, and …read more

  • Hacking On Mars In “The Martian”

    23 Comments

    By Steven Dufresne | June 30, 2017

    It’s been 6 years since the hacker’s treat of a book, “The Martian” by Andy Weir, was self-published, and 2 years since the movie came out. We’ve talked about it briefly before, but enough time has passed that we can now write-up the book’s juicier hacks while being careful to not give away any plot spoilers. The book has more hacks than the movie so we’re using the book as the source.

    For anyone unfamiliar with the story, Mark Watney is an astronaut who’s left for dead, by himself, on Mars. To survive, he has a habitat designed for six, …read more

  • Graduation Cap Shows Us What It’s Got!

    9 Comments

    By James Hobson | June 30, 2017

    A high school graduation ceremony is well due the pomp and circumstance for making it through one of life’s many milestones. To commemorate the event with their own flair, redditor [PM_(cough)_FOR_KITTENS] hid a 32 x 32 GIF-playing LED matrix in their graduation cap!

    The board is controlled by a Teensy hosting a SmartMatrix shield. With the shield’s assistance, the matrix enables scrolling text and GIFs to play across the LEDs, as well as an SD card slot to load up your favourites. Currently, it’s set to a 50-50 chance of playing a gif — one of sixty — or one …read more

  • Using Nanotubes to Strengthen 3D Prints

    13 Comments

    By Lewin Day | June 30, 2017

    3D printing has brought the production of plastic parts to the desktops and workshops of makers the world over, primarily through the use of FDM technology. The problem this method is that when squirting layers of hot plastic out to create a part, the subsequent vertical layers don’t adhere particularly well to each other, leading to poor strength and delamination problems. However, carbon nanotubes may hold some promise in solving this issue.

    A useful property of carbon nanotubes is that they can be heated with microwave energy. Taking advantage of this, researchers coated PLA filament in a polymer film containing …read more

  • Chilling a Hot Camera

    20 Comments

    By Brian Benchoff | June 29, 2017

    [Eric]’s camera has a problem. It overheats. While this wouldn’t be an issue if [Eric] was taking one picture at a time, this camera also has a video mode, which is supposed to take several pictures in a row, one right after the other. While a camera that overheats when it’s used is probably evidence of poor thermal engineering, the solution is extremely simple: strap a gigantic heat sink to the back. That’s exactly what [Eric] did, and the finished product looks great.

    The heatsink chosen for this application is a gigantic cube of aluminum, most likely taken from an …read more

  • An Electric Fence for Snails and Slugs

    57 Comments

    By Adam Fabio | June 29, 2017

    Anyone with a garden knows about doing battle with pests. Weeds, bugs, rabbits, birds — all of them try to get a bite out of our flowers and vegetables. Some of the worst are mollusks. Snails and slugs are notorious plant attackers. Tomato plants don’t stand a chance when these beasts come to town. Some folks would reach for the pesticide or even the salt, but [wheldot] had a better idea. He built an electric fence to keep these pests at bay.

    Much like the electric fences used for large mammals like horses or cows, this fence is designed to …read more

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  • This Way to the Ingress: Keeping Stuff Dry and Clean with IP and NEMA

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